The old man nodded to himself. "The clouds would look different, of course. Unless something were terribly wrong! The moon, if visible, will have waxed or waned. It will be warmer or colder. The city may be awake or recovering from a feast."
"Cally, I feel like I've been swung by my feet into a wall. I don't get where this is going."
"Do you think it's coincidence our holiest text is called The Cycle of Arawn?" Cally waited just long enough for Dante to fear the question might not be rhetorical. "The turn of the Celeset takes 26,000 years to complete. You could chart the stars for years and see no movement. Yet Jorus won't always guide you north." He scowled at the stars. "Do you know why Urt's followers venerate the cicada?"
Dante shrugged. His cloak slipped from his shoulder, exposing his neck to the wind. "Because they're insane?"
"Because the cicada emerges once every 17 years! For 16 years and 11 months, you wouldn't have the first clue they exist. But walk in the woods at the end of the cycle and you'd think trees grew cicadas instead of leaves."
"So all the world's a cycle. Even when we can't see it."
Cally rolled his eyes. "You are terrible about simplifying things. Could you describe males without invoking balls? Tell me, when you touch the nether, does it always feel the same?"
A sudden gust of wind tore at Dante's breath. He choked on the cold air, belching. "Most of the time it's cold as a mountain stream. Others, it's warm like—"
"That was not the type of question that should be given a literal answer." The old man shooed his hand at the stairs. "Go back to bed."
"Wait, was that supposed to be a lesson?"
"It's not my business if you can't understand it."
"I think that's exactly what a teacher's business is!"
"So go to bed. Perhaps things will look different once the sun's come up."
Dante shook his head and headed downstairs. After the freezing winds, the cool stone of the stairwell felt like a lit hearth. He'd been a fool to get his hopes up. Cally was a man of games, most of them stupid. He asked ten questions to make a single statement. What good would a bit of linguistic philosophy do for Dante just a day before a two-month trip?
He saw no more of Cally that day. Hours passed in a blur of packing and preparation. The sun set and rose just the same as it had the day before. Dante's anger at Cally's opacity persisted until it came time to leave.
He gathered in the predawn courtyard with Blays, Mourn, and Lira. They had two horses apiece and a whole pile of luggage. No trumpets met them, no honor guards. Even without such fanfare, the Council would note Dante's absence soon enough, but at least the lack of ceremony would help grease Cally's lie: that he'd sent Dante and crew out on a simple scouting mission to the Norren Territories.
Cally met them just inside the gates. A shapeless cloak obscured his thin body and wild white hair. His breath curled from his mouth. Another man stood beside him, fine-boned and trim.
"Everyone," Cally said, gesturing to the man, "meet Fann."
"Well met," Fann said cheerily, extending his hand. "Please consider me your guide through the wilderness that is foreign culture."
"Guide?" Blays said. "How different can these places be? It's all part of the same empire."
The man shrugged his narrow shoulders. "It wasn't always."
"Thank you for the offer," Dante said, "but I think we'll be able to handle a few bluebloods."
Fann cocked his head, one eyebrow raised in perfect mockery of a bemused scion. "Did you know that in Tantonnen, it is considered a mortal insult to come to your host's house bearing eggs?"
"I wasn't going to bring any eggs to anybody."
"And I suppose you know every other custom, tradition, ritual, and insult across Greater Gask. Well, suit yourself. It's not as if the entire fate of norrendom depends on this trip." Fann turned to go.
"We should take him," Lira said.
Blays scratched the blond stubble on his neck. "I think she's right."
"Oh, all right." Dante glared at Cally. "I hope he's more helpful than your advice."
"You're still mad about our lesson, aren't you?" Cally laughed. "What if you die out there? You'll regret your ingratitude for eternity! Do you have any idea how long that is?"
"You made out like your secret would change my life."
"Maybe it will."
"Yes, in that I'll never listen to anyone over fifty again."
"Ah. Then tragically, you won't hear me say 'Here, take this for your journey.'" He pulled a shallow box from his cloak, lacquered black wood that reflected the wind-teased torches.
"What's that, a present?" Blays leaned down from his horse. "I'll take it if he doesn't want it."
"On one condition." Cally held a knobby finger aloft. "You can't let him see them until he says something nice about me."
"Deal."
The old man passed the box with a metallic clink. "Anyway, let's not make this a big to-do. I expect to see you again in a relative blink. Try not to let your failures drag you down. It won't be easy to convince others to turn against the long knives of the king." Cally bulged out his whiskered cheeks. "Then again, try not to fail completely. If you do, we could all die here, you know."
"I'll see what I can do," Dante said. He nudged his horse forward. It took the first step of what would be a very long journey.
10
Dante clopped beneath the gate. Its thick stone occluded the stars. He liked best the journeys that began before sunrise. They always had an air of purpose to them. An import so weighty they had to be started while the rest of the world was still snoring. Best of all, when the light finally touched the land, it showed him a different place than the one he'd woken up in.
"Where are we going again?" Blays said.
"Lyle's balls," Dante sighed.
"Really? Count me out, then."
"We're headed to the plains of Tantonnen. There, we'll attempt to—"
"I'm just fooling with you." Blays turned over the wooden box and held it to his ear. "Say, what do you think's in here?" He gave it a shake.
"Stop it!" Dante said. "That could be dangerous."
"To us? Or the mysterious contents of this box?"
"Knowing Cally, it could be both." He gestured across the empty boulevard. "If you're going to explode, do it over there."
"Like I'm going to pass up the chance to take you with me." Blays unclasped a flat metal hook, brought the box inches from his nose, and cracked open its lid. "Oh my."
"What is it? A tiny unicorn?"
"Better."
"A tiny unicorn with an equally tiny little flute, with which it is shockingly proficient."
"Close, but this is still better," Blays said. "This thing's useful."
"Really?" Dante nudged his horse nearer. "Let me see."
Blays snapped the box shut. "Uh-uh. You heard what Cally said."
"And normally you treat his suggestions the same way you would a spider crawling over your toast."
"I gave him my word, Dante. That isn't just something you throw away."
Dante plodded along. Mourn coughed into his fist. Dante shook his head. "All right. Cally looks very fine for a 120-year-old."
"Insufficient."
"That's a plenty nice thing to say."
"You're living up to the letter of the law, but not its spirit," Lira put in. "That's what scoundrels do."
"No one asked you," Dante muttered. He rolled his eyes at the stars. "Cally's an excellent leader. He's unorthodox but logical. Bold, too. While his particular mix of fearlessness and schemery is precisely what got us into this mess with Setteven, I can think of no one more likely to bring us—and the norren—through to the other side in better shape than where we left. Now can I see what's in the gods damned box?"
Blays twisted in the saddle to regard the others. "What says the audience?"
"Heartfelt," Lira nodded.
"I can't weigh in on whether it's true," Mourn said. "But anyone would be flattered to hear it."
/>
Fann took a moment to register their stares. "It was good."
"I should make you put it in writing." Blays passed over the box. "You won't be disappointed."
Dante cradled the box in his lap. The lid opened noiselessly. Inside, four brooches rested on a bed of black velvet, ivory carvings of the White Tree banded by a ring of black iron. The facets of a sapphire winked from the trunk of one tree. A note was tucked into a slit in the velvet:
Variants of your new toy. Distribute as you see fit. I suggest you take the pretty one, as it will match your eyes. They may be bonded to their recipients with a drop of the intended wearer's blood.
Don't say I never did anything for you.
~C
Dante closed the box. He wanted nothing more than to pass out the loons and deduce whatever special properties the old man had woven into the sapphired brooch, but his horse had just passed the Ingate. In less than an hour, they'd depart the city. Back into the wilds.
* * *
The road spooled south through farms and forests. The first night they slept beneath the pines a quarter mile from the road. The second, they found a crossroads inn at a farming village. The third night found them in Kalls, a modest town mixed with humans and norren.
They entered the Norren Territories on the fourth day. Patchy snow dusted the open fields and low hills. A few times a day, a wandering clan appeared on a ridge or stoked fires from the protection of a draw, but offered neither greeting nor threat.
Dante had passed out one loon to Blays and, after some thought, gave Mourn and Lira the other two. Cally could always make more later. And if either the norren or the woman turned out to be a traitor-in-waiting, Dante could just destroy his, severing the links between them forever. Because the sapphire loon, it turned out, was a hub for them all: by rotating the jewel 90 degrees, Dante could choose which of the others to communicate with. Including, if he returned the sapphire to its original alignment, with Cally.
He saw no forts or walls in the Territories. Few villages or proper buildings of any kind. Nothing, in other words, that would present a threat to an incoming army.
The road turned southwest. Short green winter wheat fought the last of the snows. They crossed out of the proper norren lands and into the unsettled boundaries of the south. For a full day, they walked their mounts along flat stretches that either had been, soon would be, or were currently being plowed. Oxen, workers, and short, sturdy houses dotted the fields of brown and green. Mourn watched them steadily, tipping back his head as if trying to place an elusive smell. Townsmoke rose from the clear horizon. An hour after dark, they reached Shan, the local capital, and bought up five rooms at a fieldstone inn. Dante chafed at the price—they could easily have made do with three—but they had appearances to keep up.
Fann led them up a well-trod dirt path the following morning. With the sun approaching noon, Dante stopped in front of a roughstone manor. Three round towers filled out its body, four stories high and equally wide. Two-story connectors linked the silo-like wings. In the fields beyond, wooden barns and outbuildings stood above the young green fields.
A light breeze ruffled Dante's hair. He glanced at Fann. "I guess you should...announce us."
"Don't be silly, my lord." Fann gestured up the gravel path. "We're in Tantonnen now. If you send your servants ahead to 'announce' you, the locals will look at you like you've asked for a golden toilet."
"We should get one of those," Blays said. "I've always thought our silver seats were declasse."
"Any other helpful advice?" Dante said.
Fann tapped his delicate fingers together. "They're not fond of shaking hands. Perhaps because theirs are always so dirty. In any event, doing so will brand you as an outsider. Furthermore, deposit your boots at the door unless you would like the head of the household to deposit his between your buttocks."
"I think that's enough." Dante dismounted and crunched up the path. He thumped the knocker of the banded wooden door. A middle-aged man appeared in the doorway, stocky and stubbled, his round gut and swollen biceps placing equal strains on the fabric of his brown doublet.
"Is Lord Brant in?" Dante said.
The man smiled. "Unless I've been overthrown in the last five minutes." He turned and bellowed back into the house. "Jilla! Have I been overthrown recently?"
"You will if you don't knock off that hollering," a woman called back.
Brant chuckled and turned back to Dante. "Looks like I'm still the lord." His gaze dropped to the two brooches on Dante's chest. "You must be what's-your-name. From Narashtovik."
"Dante Galand." He didn't offer his hand.
"Thought you'd be older. Well, come inside. Your friends, too. I'll send a man to see to the horses."
Dante had plenty of time to take in the household as he picked the knots from his boots and placed his footwear beside the door. Hard winter light gushed through the windows of the large round room. The windows were glass, and fine-stitched rugs covered nearly every inch of the wooden floors, but there was a simplicity to the room beyond the informality of the baronet who owned it. Above the fieldstone fireplace, a ho rested across two pegs, displayed as proudly as a knight's blade.
"The same one my ancestor used to first break these fields," Brant said, catching him looking. "Scrub off the rust and I'm sure it still could."
"Nonsense," a woman smiled from the stone staircase. "You'd rather churn the dirt with your own teeth than let that old thing touch open air."
"I said it could," Brant said mildly.
The woman was his wife, Jilla. While she made introductions, Brant trundled off to dispatch riders to inform the local lords of the group's arrival. After a lunch of pork, potatoes, and the best bread Dante'd ever tasted, Brant brought their horses back from the stable and led them on a tour of the estate.
"We'll have dinner tomorrow," he told Dante, rolling atop his cracked leather saddle. "And tonight, of course. Imagine me taking you in and then leaving you to fend for yourselves!" He laughed, voice carrying on the flickering wind. "That's when we'll speak, I mean."
"That's fine," Dante said. "Our time isn't so precious just yet."
"Still, I'll try to help you make the most of it. I have a rough idea why you're down here. I'm sure your offer will be a right one. But don't bet your winter on it being snapped up."
"Don't tell me they're afraid of the king."
"Why would they be? All he's got is an army. And a mountain of gold. And a kingdom of people who think no more about beating a norren than a donkey that's stepped on their foot."
Dante laughed. "I'll modulate my expectations accordingly."
Brant filled the rest of the day with small talk about how winter had treated him, his expectations for the approaching spring, and questions about Narashtovik, which he hadn't visited in twelve years, meaning he'd seen none of its resurgence with his own eyes.
"Last time I saw the place, it was empty as an old man's mouth," he said during their post-dinner discussion, his socked feet propped on a chair. "You make it sound like it could sit next to Setteven in the jeweled crown of Gask."
"Not quite yet." Dante sat down his beer, a blueberry- and clover-tinged lager Jilla had brewed over the winter. "But 'The Dead City' is getting to be a more ironic name by the day."
Brant nodded, uncharacteristically quiet. "Things change fast, don't they."
Dante went to bed not long after. His room was snug and draft-free. In the morning, Brant brought them to town after breakfast to show off Shan's windmills and irrigation canals. It was a simple place. Built to last. If war came, Dante hoped it spared these windy fields.
Brant's fellow baronets arrived that afternoon. Like Brant, most of the six lords showed signs of long days on the farms despite their noble titles, their forearms ropy, their faces tanned and lined. Their opinions were as large as their shoulders. Their appetites, too. At the long feast-table that took up most of the lower floor of the second wing, they sat at attention while Jilla blessed the fo
od (a stripped-down version of the ritual that involved a couple words and a couple flicks of saltwater from her fingers), then fell to the meal like it would be their last, disassembling roast chickens and vegetable pies faster than the two servants could bring out the next dish. Steaming bread appeared by the platter: puffy white loaves; round disks studded with nuts and grains; moist, crumbly slices embedded with raisins and dripping with butter; flatbread smeared with almond paste.
Dante assumed this wealth of breads was just an extravagance of the feast, but over the next few days, he learned it was entirely standard for Tantonnen. Almost every meal involved their staple crop in some way, be it in the wrapper of boiled pork dumplings or in the pan-fried slabs that Tantonners carried as portable meals, pie-like medleys of boiled meat, raw nuts, potatoes, and vegetables all mashed up and held together with a glue of oily dough. These were the most perfect invention Dante had ever seen.
As normal for such gatherings, the lords' dinnertime talk stayed light—how the last snows had treated them, the town cloudsman's predictions for a mild spring. Finally, the farmers toyed with chicken skins, juice-soaked bread crusts, and their fourth beers of the night.
Unprompted, the oldest of the men, a thin and wind-chapped man named Raye, pointed a chicken bone at Dante. "So what is it you want from us?"
Dante swallowed beer to clear his throat. "You've heard, I'm sure, of the recent unrest."
"I'm sure."
"We're not friends of any war, but we are friends of the norren. We fear that, if invasion comes, many innocents will starve."
Raye bunched up his gray brows. "Do you think? Most I've seen do plenty well leeching off the land."
"Plenty of them live in towns just like you or me," Dante said. "If an army marches on its stomach, towns and their granaries are the stepping-stones they use to cross the river of conflict."
"Now that's a pretty metaphor," said a fat lord named Vick, his tone much drier than his beer-foamed beard.
Blays clunked down his mug. "That's because he's too dumb to say stuff straight. Thing is, civilians will starve. You've got food here. We want some of it and will pay money to buy it."
The Great Rift Page 25
